NEW YORK — The Huffington Post said Sunday that it will bankroll a group of investigative journalists, directing them at first to look at stories about the nation’s economy.

The popular Web site is collaborating with The Atlantic Philanthropies and other donors to launch the Huffington Post Investigative Fund with an initial budget of $1.75 million. That should be enough for 10 staff journalists who will primarily coordinate stories with freelancers, said Arianna Huffington, co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post.

Work that the journalists produce will be available for any publication or Web site to use at the same time it is posted on The Huffington Post, she said.

Depending on whom you ask, citizen journalism is either pushing journalism forward or is unaccountable vigilantism. Either way, it is shaping the way we consume our news.

Surely ordinary citizens were documenting and discussing news events before the advent of the internet but what separates citizen journalism from pure observation is the use of the net as an avenue to either aid or circumvent traditional media outlets and spread the news independently. Average Joes can take their own photos, record their own video and recount a story through blogs or other social media, often more quickly than a media organization can begin to report and in a more organic way than is usually presented by mainstream media.

The following is a timeline of events in which ordinary citizens shaped the news, followed by an analog description of each landmark moment.

Q:Is there really a “citizen Journalism”? I can’t answer, some say i’m unfit to comment on this. Check this excellent list, it will become a part of Journalism History books.

The leaked DNA test on 13-year-old alleged dad Alfie Patten has revealed a big problem with court-ordered reporting restrictions in the internet age. (NB This is a cut down version of a much longer original post on blogging and reporting restrictions).

Court orders forbidding publication of certain facts apply only to people or companies who have been sent them. But this means there is nothing to stop bloggers publishing material that mainstream news organisations would risk fines and prison for publishing.

Even if a blogger knows that there is an order, and so could be considered bound by it, an absurd catch 22 means they can’t found out the details of the order – and so they risk contempt of court and prison.

Despite the obvious problem the Ministry of Justice have told me they have no plans to address the issue.

I‘ve been arguing for some time that journalists need to embrace the best elements of social media — going beyond the new media and multimedia elements of the craft developed over the past 15 years to develop a true conversation about the news with members of their communities.

In the past few weeks I’ve begun plying the waters to see who’s begun to take advantage of the new social tools now available to all of us, in preparation for an online course I’ll be giving, along with Paul Gillin and Michele McLellan, at the Poynter Institute’s News U. starting next month about how news organizations can incorporate social media in their news offerings. (The lessons are equally applicable to corporations, government agencies, nonprofits and other institutions.)

The U.S. newspaper industry was already facing numerous challenges before the economy took a nosedive, but the latest data from the Newspaper Association of America shows that the current economic climate has only exacerbated the already dire state of the American newspaper industry. Specifically, total newspaper advertising revenue fell 16.6% in 2008. Classifieds advertising, which is under a lot of pressure from online ventures like Craigslist, fell almost 30%, and real estate classifieds fell 38%.

At the crossroad of old journalism and new media, digital news entrepreneurs—some at Web-only operations, others expanding the reach of storytelling on the Web—lead us on voyages of discovery into new media. From MinnPost to MediaStorm, these entities are using visual media, interactivity and social media to watchdog government abuse and the justice system, identify environmental dangers, and tell enduring stories. In doing so, they illuminate possibilities. In our continuing 21st Century Muckrakers series, our spotlight turns to investigative reporting about medical and health issues. Firsthand reporting experiences testify forcefully to the essential, yet challenging, role journalists play in alerting us to harmful situations. —Melissa Ludtke, Editor

In a post titled “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable,” Clay Shirky, who teaches interactive telecommunications at New York University, makes what many would consider a heretical statement: “Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism.” It’s clear the newspaper business will never be the same. Here are five best practices publishers should consider to increase their odds of survival

As you might know, i went to Guimarães this weekend to participate in the 2nd Journalists Convention organized by the Guimarães Press Office, a local journalists association. These were two great days, with great people and good conversations about journalism. Here’s a short account of the Convention.

This was just my second event of the kind. All of the speakers in this convention are working for local or national media (hell, i was the only one unemployed), and there was a valuable combined working experience. But that was the purpose, to reflect upon journalism based on practice, rather than on possibilities and theories – which is also extremely important and necessary. It’s a matter of perspective.

What surprised me was the fact that many of the issues that came up during the debates and presentations were the same i wanted to talk about in my presentation: the need to humanize journalism, it’s social importance, the change in the relationship between media and audience, the role of journalists, questions i find more philosophical than technological (though related). The theme for the convention was change, but what i heard the most was the need to go back to the basics of the job, no matter what the technology available, should it be a computer or a roadside blackboard. Trust between media and audience, between journalists and their sources, was also on the table a few times. Since a huge part of the audience were Journalism students, there was pedagogical value in some interventions.

Though i enjoyed and learned a lot from every speaker, I really liked to listen to Miguel Carvalho, of the portuguese magazine Visão, who is a young, yet old fashioned reporter, that prefers the streets to computers. This could mean a huge gap between our points of view (i’m on the geek side as you know) , but not really. For both of us it’s the story that matters, the importance of the Other, the value of the information and it’s human consequences. And besides being a great writer, he is a funny guy. Everyone was, i had a great time during the breaks, where we exchanged our points of view, and quickly digressed from journalism to other unrelated topics (or is the new portuguese Playboy magazine journalism related ?).

When it came to my turn to make my presentation Saturday morning i was quite comfortable with my audience. The main subject was “Journalism and Technology”, and i was set to briefly explain how we went from mass media to social media, but how the responsibility of journalism in building a social conscience is still the same. I got on the wrong foot (i was a bit nervous, which made me skip a liaison part of my presentation so i started rambling), but i got myself together. I was open to comments during my presentation, and i asked a few questions to the audience, with quick polls. I hate reading stuff out loud, and i feel this sort of interaction worked. It was different, at least. My fellow speakers for this panel were Paulo Querido and Luís Miguel Loureiro, which are in opposite sides of the spectrum of the discussion on Technology and Journalism, but there was no real disagreement, both have different yet valid views. That is really important, diversity. They were very supportive of me (thanks guys!), and we held the longest debate of the convention, we delayed the workgroups a bit, but it was worth it. Unfortunately i had to leave in the afternoon, so i wasn’t there for the closing.

I have to thank the organization of the convention, especially Samuel Silva and Paulo Machado, who so generously invited and received me in Guimarães. I hope i was up to the expectations, and added value to the event. They know that can count on me for anything.

All in all it was a great couple of days, i made some new contacts, got to know a few people “in real life”, had a lot of positive feedback on my work, and though i’m somewhat an outsider, i felt like at home. There’s nothing better i could say about it.

I’ll be away for a couple of days to participate in the 2nd Journalist’s Convention in Guimarães. I was kindly invited to participate Saturday morning in a debate about how technology has changed journalism, so i’m antecipating a great time.

This will also be a chance to change the setting a bit, i really need it. I haven’t been producing as much as i should and maybe a change will do some good. I’ll be networking live, which is also good, though i’m trying to be live from the event too, via Twitter. I’ll let you know.

Columbia Journalism School professor Ari Goldman to his freshman students at on their first day of class.

Goldman, a former Times reporter and sixteen-year veteran RW1 professor, described new-media training as “playing with toys,” according to another student, and characterized the digital movement as “an experimentation in gadgetry…”

This fad coinage is meant to represent a new discovery, a new way of thinking about journalism: “Hey, gee, we should do some of this local stuff. People might actually like to read about their home towns.”

“Hyperlocal” is ugly because it attempts to rewrite history, ignoring the noble, once-primary role of newspapers — largely forgotten by journalists and publishers in the past several decades — as the concourse for community life.

Since it’s so rare to find good journalism-related news these days, I thought I would report one of the positive things I learned from the College Media Advisers conference last week in New York City.

One of the keynote addresses at this conference, attended by journalism students and their professors/adivsors, was by Brian Storm of MediaStorm, who was also incidentally the speaker at my recent Mizzou PhD graduation. Storm is a funny, irreverent, and new media savvy guy, and his small multimedia production studio produces freelance work for the likes of The Washington Post and National Geographic.

(…) In Storm’s view, if you stick to your values, you’d be surprised by what just might happen.

For the study, AP commissioned a team of anthropologists to follow 18 young individuals around the world and examine their media habits.

“We looked for just regular people,” said Jim Kennedy, Vice President and Director for Strategic Planning at AP. “The only prerequisite was that we wanted them to be digital consumers.”

Anthropologists quickly found that the digital news diet of this age group was very unbalanced, based mostly on ‘facts’ and ‘updates’ – two characteristics of email news. However, as opposed to some editors’ conventional wisdom, the young consumers “wanted more than that. They wanted to find a path to the back story, and they wanted to find a path to what’s going to happen next.”

Here are websites, blogs, and other online work from other staff members from the former Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspaper. Most are starting new ventures after the death of the print edition. I’ll update the list as other projects go live.

According to today’s The Guardian, there is a curriculum proposal for the primary school in Britain that wants to make children “familiar with blogging, podcasts, Wikipedia and Twitter as sources of information and forms of communication.”

Should this be surprising? Not at all. E-skills are basic skills nowadays, and the kids have to learn them. But i can hear the row starting already…

Children will no longer have to study the Victorians or the second world war under proposals to overhaul the primary school curriculum, the Guardian has learned.

However, the draft plans will require children to master Twitter and Wikipedia and give teachers far more freedom to decide what youngsters should be concentrating on in classes.

The proposed curriculum, which would mark the biggest change to primary schooling in a decade, strips away hundreds of specifications about the scientific, geographical and historical knowledge pupils must accumulate before they are 11 to allow schools greater flexibility in what they teach.

The Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas at the University of Texas at Austin has just published a Portuguese-language edition of the e-book How to Write for the Web, written by Colombian journalist Guillermo Franco and translated by Brazilian journalist Marcelo Soares.

How to Write for the Web is the second skills guide for journalists that the Knight Center has published. In December 2007, the Knight Center launched electronic Spanish and Portuguese editions of the e-book Journalism 2.0: How to Survive and Thrive, A digital literacy guide for the information age, written by U.S. journalist Mark Briggs.

The Spanish, Portuguese, and English editions of that book can also be downloaded in PDF format for free from the Knight Center’s website. It has been downloaded close to 17,000 times since its publication.